All right, good to have you guys. Doing good? Awesome, awesome. My name is Mark. For those of you who are new, a special welcome to you. I am one of the pastors here. Good to have you.
We are in a series called "Sound Mind." If you got your notes, take those out. If you have a Bible, Philippians chapter 4 is where we're going to end up.
I'm gonna frame the issue and the problem of burnout first, the heart and vision behind this series. Paul talks about this in the book of First Timothy, that God doesn't give you a spirit of fear but a spirit of a sound mind. That is the vision for your life that God has and that we have for you: that in the midst of the craziness of this world, in the midst of the stresses, the anxieties, the depressions of this world, that you would have a sound mind.
Jesus says in John 14, "Peace I give to you, not as the world gives you, but as I give it to you." And sometimes we're like, "Yeah, but okay, peace. I love that. I want that." Martin Lloyd Jones talks about the fact that probably underneath everything else, the thing behind everything else is that we all want peace. We all want kind of a spirit that is sound. We want peace, and Jesus goes, "I'm going to give it to you."
Some of you right now are like, "Yeah, well, hold on a second, though. I've believed in Jesus, but I don't have all the peace that I want. I still have depression and anxiety and difficulty in my life." All of these things we're talking about, and why isn't it the case? That's to misunderstand what Jesus means by peace. Of course, he means wholeness, but he also means it in a way where we get a perspective of eternity that says some of you are like, "Yeah, I've believed in Jesus, but I still have a diagnosis," or "my friends around me are experiencing difficulty or dying."
Listen, Christianity doesn't promise that when you believe in Jesus, you're not going to die. It says that you're safe in dying. That's the difference. And that's why Jesus says, "I can give you a kind of peace that the world can't give you." Because when the world falls apart, not everything's going to be perfect for you because we live in a fallen world.
Right? Even I, as a pastor, I've told you many times I have Tourette Syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder. I got tics and weird things that I do, and you know, I think I'm getting better. Ask Aaron. But the reality is I am a pastor, which means I'm more godly than you, and I still have these problems. So if I've got these problems, you're going to have these problems.
Because we live, theologically, we've got to start with the Bible to understand the problems that we face rather than all the psychology in the world. The Bible is going to tell us that we live in a broken world. That's why we have the difficulties that we have. It's that we live in a broken world. It was a good situation. We were with God in the garden in Genesis 1, but then we sinned, and it broke. Physically, there was disease and difficulty, and you know, we have pain during childbirth now. Well, I don't, but you women have pain during childbirth now.
There is emotional, spiritual, physical wreckage that has taken place, which is why we get tired now. And we're talking about the idea of what we're talking about today: burnout. Maybe in the paradise scenario before the fall, we could have run forever and done anything we wanted and worked forever and had all the stress and the strain and anxiety that we have and not feel burned out. But we live in a fallen world, so believe your own theology.
Right? Some people I meet, they're like, "Why did this person stab me in the back? Why is this person being so difficult?" Well, believe the theology that you believe, which is we live in a fallen world. That's why they're talking behind your back. We live in a depraved situation where everything was good, but then we fell and we broke.
And there's different versions of this and different levels of what we're talking about today, which is burnout. So how many of you in your life have come to a place at some point where you have felt completely exhausted and tired at some level? It could be work, right? It could be family. It could be being a teenager. It could be being whatever it is, and you feel like, "Man, I am just, my wires are done. I just don't have capacity anymore." This is what we're talking about today.
And there are different levels of it. There are levels like I experienced, kind of a lower level but probably serious. So you guys know years ago I planted a church up in Vancouver in 2010, and it started with 16 people, which was great. And that's about the amount that I like to manage. And then those 16 became 50, and those 50 became 100, and they became 200, became 300. And then I had to get some staff, and I was like, "Ah."
And you guys know I don't like people, and so I was like, "Oh, what about my holidays? 40 hours? I think I already worked my 40 hours." And I'm like, "Oh gosh." So then 300 became 500, became 800, became 900, became 1200, became 3000 between 5,000 in campuses and cities in Canada. And all the stress and the strain of this, and then it was like, "Oh, you're the voice of Canada." And I'm like, "What? That's a new burden I've never felt before. What do you mean?"
And now you're this, and now you're that, and you're all of these things. And oh, by the way, we need land, so we need 10 million bucks, so go raise that and be a psychologist and a marriage counselor and a philosopher and a pastor of the internet and be a theologian and be a psychologist and be a fundraiser and be a counselor and, and, and.
And after about seven years of this, I just started to feel worn out and broken to the point where, man, my highs weren't as high, my lows weren't as low. I'd be talking to you in the lobby, and I just got nothing for you. I'm just like, I'm not even hearing what you're saying right now. And people around me would say, "Man, you look tired all the time." And I'm like, "Yeah."
Because we got to a place where I'm going to talk about this at the end of the message. We got to a place for us preaching so much and doing so many things, I completely burned out. And this is what happens in life. It can happen so easily. I have a friend who he was working really hard doing all these presentations, and then he did his master's degree. And the day he got his dissertation back, he got the email, and something in him broke.
He didn't get out of bed for three months. Something in his mind, all the pressure and strain and stress broke him to the point where he couldn't even function anymore. So this is what we're talking about when we're talking about burnout and how serious it can be. And I say to myself, would I have done it different? Yes. Would I have not done it in order to save myself that difficulty? No, because there were people who met Jesus because of that work.
Because, you know, when Jesus resurrects from the dead, he still has the scars of the wounds that the world gave him. That's because, as I read this week, the reason you have scars is because it means that you lived. Every single one of us is going to be hurt in some way by the world because that means that you lived a life. You try to do something significant, and there's going to be some wounds that come of that.
And there's things we can heal from, and there's things we will have forever. And so why is this an issue? The Bible has told us because of brokenness, because of the fall. That's why it's an issue. Now, some of you, when you start looking at the list of all the things that we're talking about: anxiety and depression and relational wounds, you might look at this week and go, "Burnout? It's kind of like a throwaway week, isn't it? That's not really that important."
But that's to misunderstand burnout because do you know that literally being tired in the Bible is a description of hell? If you read Revelation 14:11, which I'm sure you read in your devos this morning, but I'm going to reiterate it for you. Revelation 14:11 says this: "And the smoke of their torment will rise forever and ever. There will be no rest day or night."
For those literally being tired in the Bible is a description for what hell will be like. Being tired. Like, so this week, we got a new puppy. So we've got a dog, and we got another dog because we're millennial parents, and our kids wanted it. So we just give them whatever they want. So they're like, "We want a puppy." We're like, "Of course."
So we get a puppy, and weirdly enough, don't ask me why or how, but this company delivered the puppy at two o'clock in the morning. That's when it comes. So bizarre. They travel all around California, and they drop them off whenever they have these massive Amazon vans, and they're all cooled and chilled, and the dogs sleep. And these two guys trade out. They're driving, and they were in San Francisco, and they just call us at 11 o'clock, like, "We'll be there in three hours." I'm like, "Oh, what? Two o'clock in the morning?"
So I was like, "Oh my gosh." So I got my kids. I'm like, "I want you to wake me up to make sure that we don't get murdered, to be honest, because who just lets a random truck pull up at their house at 2 AM and a stranger like, 'I'm coming to come in your house. Come on in, Joey.'"
So I'm like, "Make sure you wake me up." So my daughter comes at 1:55, wakes me, "Daddy, daddy, it's almost here." And they've been up all night waiting for it. So I come down, and as I'm walking down the stairs, I'm like, "This is hell. This is what it's like."
I remember when I was a junior high pastor for years, we used to do these things called all-nighters. And we gathered the kids in the church, and all night we just stayed up all night, and we played games and all this stuff. And I'm sitting there watching these kids, and it's three o'clock in the morning, and they're playing Chubby Bunny, putting licorice up their nose. And I'm just looking out, and I'm like, "This is hell."
Right? This is what the Bible's talking about. To be tired, to be tired, to be burnt out, it's not a small thing. It could be the difference between life and death. This is why the Bible's like, "Man, this is actually going to be a thing for the soul that doesn't choose to rest in God, writ out eternally."
And so why is this an issue in our time? I have to address that for a quick second because the New York Times has said that the number one issue facing America is the mental health of teenagers. That is where this is going: phones, comparison, the social game. And some of us of a different generation have taken a narrative about the mental health issues of this generation, and we've kind of cast a little bit of disparagement on it. We don't understand it.
I'm guilty of this too because we look at them, and we go, "Listen, around Starbucks, you shouldn't have a mental health issue. We have the best time. This is the best generation. We got the nicest stuff. Don't put me back 400 years ago in Braveheart times, right, where everyone dies by the time they're 22."
And the pain of going to, if you've got a toothache, good luck, right? Everyone drives a hammer in their head and a sword in their head. That's rough. And we go in our heads, "That's difficult today. What a bunch of weak losers." Right? Go back to this.
What we think during COVID, I remember there was a meme that came out, and it was like, "Don't worry, we're going to get through this. You can be courageous. We got to be courageous, and we got to be strong." And it was like, and even I at that time was laughing because it was like, "Yeah, be courageous and strong," which meant stay in my living room at my house and all be courageous because in Canada it was two years. Right? You guys down here were a couple weeks, but two years in Canada we were in our house because if you don't test for it, it's not real.
So we were two years in our house, and you guys, so it was like, "Stay in your house and be brave." But then on the same meme, it was like a 20-year-old guy storming Normandy, and it was like, "Wow, we have a different definition of brave and courageous today than we did back then."
And I used to kind of laugh at that and go, "Yeah, why are we so weak? Why do we go through these things?" And then I ran across a very important study, a book by the name of "Margin" by Dr. Richard Swenson. Here's what he says. It's a very important distinction to make. He says, "The widespread substitution of mental strain for physical strain is no advantage from our point of view. Proper physical work, even if strenuous, does not absorb a great deal of the power of attention, but mental work does, so that there is no attention left over for the spiritual things that really matter."
It is obviously much easier for a hard-working peasant to keep his mind attuned to the divine than for a strained office worker. And what he means is this: it's almost like, men and women, it's not wrong; it's just different. Physical work, the work that people did 200 years ago at the farm, that was far more physically laborious than the generation faces now, but it wasn't as psychologically laborious.
There is emotional complexity, so it was harder on the body but not as hard on the mind. And so there's emotional complexity, social complexity, relational complexity that we have today that we've never had in the history of our time, which is why we see all the mental health challenges that we do. Everything's on the up and to the right. Everything's up and to the right, and it's because we're doing different kinds of work today.
Right? My mom was visiting last week, and she watched me work, and she compared how she worked. And she said, "Mark, like, I literally had the same job from the time I was 18 years old until I retired when I was 55." And at that job, I would go, I would work, and I'd come home, and that was it. That was the job. No one would be able to get in touch with me. You are constantly on. People are calling you, your email, you're editing this video, you're showing that, you're doing social media, you're getting logos, all of this work, constantly working with people and teams.
She's like, "I don't know how you do it because it always is with you. You never get to just break from it." That's what we're facing today. That's what this generation is facing. Social media: who am I? Do they like me? Do they not like me? What's my projection out into the world? What relationships am I having? It's far more emotionally complex.
So let me go through a checklist of things and see if you are experiencing burnout. Right? We're going to put them up on the screen. You can take pictures, take your notes, you got your fill-ins. Grab your pen, write this down really quick. Here are signs that you're burning out.
First, your passion fades. Your passion fades. You just don't have the same kick that you used to have. Secondly, you don't feel the highs and lows anymore emotionally. You used to go up high and then go down low. Now you're just kind of in the middle all the time. You're just not really feeling much. That's a sign that you might be burning out.
Little things make you overly emotional. A little moment that normally would be nothing, you totally go off the rails about it. It becomes apocalyptic at every moment. Everybody drains you. Right? You're just like, "My goodness, like everybody's like, 'Oh my gosh, Tom is calling again. I can't pick it up.'" It's like, "Tom's your son."
Everybody is draining you. You're becoming cynical. Your default setting is cynicism. You see the negative in every idea, every person, every event. If this is you, you might be experiencing burnout. Nothing satisfies you. There's nothing. You never feel like, "Okay, got it. One, that's a win." It's just, "Nah, it could have been this, could have been this."
You can't think straight. Your productivity is dropping. You're self-medicating, so you're using shopping or drugs or whatever to medicate yourself. You don't laugh anymore. You don't have those big guttural experiences where you're like, "Yes, I just felt something." And then you sleep in time off and no longer refuel you. Right? You're spending so much time trying to get vacation.
America spends about 10 percent of their income on vacation. They tithe to the vacation God versus tithing to the church. The Bible tells you to tithe to God in the mission of Jesus, and we don't do that. We give a little tip to the Lord and go on with our lives, and then we tithe to Vacation God hoping that we get a sound mind and spirit on it.
And what happens is one study has shown that 56 percent of people when they return from vacation are more stressed than when they went. This is what begins to happen to us because you haven't answered any of those emails. "Oh, I gotta answer all these emails. Ah."
So here's the basic issue when you boil it down: it's one word: overload. We're doing too much against the capacity that we have to do it. Overload. You don't have the capacity to do all the things you're trying to do emotionally, physically, the rhythms of your life.
So I'm going to give you a Swenson talks about a bunch of different kinds of overload. I'll go through a list for you. First kind of overload is activity overload. We are the busiest generation in the world. The technology that we created to get margin in our lives has created less margin: emails, texts, expectations growing up.
Right? Those of you like me grew up, I was born in 1980. As kids, let's go, let's go. So I would call my best friend on the phone, and then they just wouldn't pick up, and that was the end. That was the story. If they were rich, they had a voicemail, and I would leave a voicemail. But then immediately what would I do? Because honestly, in that situation, it would ring like six or seven times, and then it would just stop.
So I'm always picturing the family's got groceries. They're like, "No," because you don't know who it is. Right? You didn't know who it was. So then I would just call back right away, and I call back, and I call back, and I call back, which is why I can remember all of my friends' phone numbers growing up right now. And I couldn't tell you what my phone number is right now. I could not tell you what my cell phone number is, but I can still tell you what theirs was because I would call back and call back and call back because I wanted to get in touch with them.
That was how life was. You wouldn't hear from them for a day, day or two, you'd be like, "I don't know, man. I guess they're getting bad. I wanted to go to the park." But that's it. Now you send someone a text, and four minutes later, you're like, "You didn't answer my text. Where are you? Do you hate me? Is this over? Are you dead? You hate me, don't you? Are we broken up?"
The expectation and the margin has, the expectation is here, and the margin is none. So we have activity overload. We have change overload. We have the highest levels of change of any generation. My mom lived in the same house from the time she was two until she got married, and from the time she was married until she retired at 55 percent, actually until she was 65, and then she just moved to her third home of all time.
My kids have lived in nine houses in 11 years in two countries. We are the most. Generations never moved 100 miles from where they were born. We see change continuously in our lives, and we don't know what to do about it. It's overload.
The third kind of overload is choice overload. Right? We have too many choices. The sociologists call it the paralysis of choice. Right? My wife sends me, "Hey, go to the grocery store and get tomato sauce." Do you know how complex the command to get tomato sauce is? There are 114 different tomato sauces in the grocery store. "Hey, get headache medicine." I don't know if you want long-lasting or quick-acting. I don't know what's happening.
Paralysis of choice. Right? When you're dating, you can date one of 80 million people now on a date. It used to be someone who wasn't in your family. That was the bar. And where Kevin Thompson's from, it's still a thing. Too many choices. We don't know what to do.
All right, fourthly, we have commitment overload. We're part of too many things. Guys, your kids are in five different clubs, eight different sports teams, 14 different events, eight different, there's six different that friend group, this friend group, drive them here, drive them there. We're way overcommitted.
We got our kids in way too many things. They're going all over the place. We don't know what to do. We don't know where the identity rests. Overcommitted will drive us to burnout. Next, debt. We have debt overload. We have more debt than any generation by far. We are way over our heads with debt, whether it's housing or credit cards, whatever.
My grandmother, who raised me, I would go over to her house all the time, and she was like, she would save rubber bands. This is how she lived. And I'm like, I'm watching, I'm like, "I'm sure we're good with the rubber bands. I don't think we're going to run out of those." "No, no, don't throw that away. Don't throw that away." And she would hold the road because she grew up in a time, you know, World War II time, man, it's like you hold everything.
My kids, on the other hand, I won't mention any names, but my oldest, we were on our way to a trip somewhere, and we stopped in for a couple of days in Dubai and did like this, you know, camel ride across the desert. This was a bunch of years ago, and we're going, and I'll never forget, I was on the camel and watching her, and I see like her sandal fall off her foot and then the other one. And I'm like, "Oh, hey, hey, stop. What's going on?"
She's like, "Well, Dad, my feet are hurting." And I'm just thinking like, "I'll just kick my shoes off here, and then we'll just buy me new ones tomorrow." What? All right, this is what this is what we're talking about, guys. Right? My nanny is saving rubber bands, and this is kicking her shoes off in the middle of the desert. That's why we have so much debt.
We'll just buy another one. Right? And we're like, "I don't know what to do with the debt." It's like, "You know what? I don't know how I got here." I'll tell you how you got here. It's called math, and you can't kick against it. It's just what it is. You're bringing in less than you're putting out.
We have debt. Last overload is information overload. We know too much news. We know too much what's going on. We're stressed. We know this. We know that. We know all the weather, all the crime, all the killings, everything.
Now, guys, here's the thing. This is the world we live in, and if we're not going to move to Loomis and make our own buttons, then the only other option is we figure out how to strategically exist in this world and be faithful to Jesus and live in the world but not of the world.
So what are the strategies to do all that? So that's the problem. Now, what are the strategies? This is where the Bible gives us this beautiful vision. Philippians chapter four, listen to it: "Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever's right, whatever's pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy," underline this word, "what does he say? Think about such things."
Now, if you start to think about such things, what happens? "Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me or seen in me, put into practice, and the God of peace will be with you." You think about something, you put it into practice, and you get a result. This is why Paul says this in Philippians 4. The most powerful thing about you is your mind. It's the most powerful thing about you.
This is why Christianity says, "Hey, Jesus, what's the most important thing?" That you love God with your whole heart, soul, mind, and strength because your mind is going to be the thing that defines your life. It's the most powerful thing about you.
I tell the story in my book, "The Problem of Jesus," about a guy named Vance Vander. It's an absolutely true story. Vance Vander's family realizes he is declining in his health. They don't know what to do. They bring him to the hospital. The hospital works on him for three or four days, can't figure out what's wrong with him. Finally, they say, "We don't know what to do, but this guy's two or three days away from death."
Funny, one of the family members brings the doctor aside, and they say, "Vance told us the other day that he had been walking around the cemetery, and a witch had talked to him and put a spell on him." And the doctor said, "I know what to do."
And the doctor went down to the local pond, and he picked a frog out, and he walked up into the room, and he gathered the family, and he said, "I went and I found the witch, and she told me what she had done. She had put a frog in the stomach of Vance, and it's causing all of his sickness. But she told me how to get it out."
And so the doctor pretended to cut him open, pulled the frog out, all bloodied up, and he injected Vance Vander with something that would make him throw up. He held the frog in front of Vance and said, "You were healed." And two days later, Vance Vander walked out of the hospital perfectly healthy.
It's in your mind. Eighty percent of the reason we go to the doctor is stuff in our minds. It's not even, it's how our minds are affecting our bodies. There's a very famous book by a doctor called "Your Body Keeps the Score." There are surgeries that they won't do with you if you're in a negative headspace. They won't do heart surgery on you because they know you're already in a negative headspace. They're afraid you will die in there because of what you think about.
What you think about, that's the thing that defines you. Think about when we were little kids. Remember this little piece of information we were always given? "You can't go in the pool swimming until 30 minutes after you eat." Remember that? That terrified us, right? We would, I would have nightmares about that, and I would be sitting on the side of the pool with my watch out just counting down to 30 minutes.
Guys, that's not real. Our parents made that nonsense up. No idea why. That's not real. That's not a thing. But if I went in that water after 26 minutes and I snuck in, I'm like, "Oh, my stomach! I got cramps!" It was all in my head. No, going in the water is not a big deal.
But what if you begin to believe that God doesn't love you? What if you begin to believe that your sins, you're the only one doing them, and you should live in complete isolation? What if you believe that you're not good enough, smart enough?
What if you believe that God can never use you unless you work harder, achieve, perform, do more on the hamster wheel of life? Because if you ain't producing, you ain't loved, you ain't celebrated, you're not rewarded. So keep going. Be a better mother, a better employee, and prove it to everybody all the time. That's when you burn out.
When you begin to believe the lie the enemy is telling you, which is the opposite. Listen to this very important. The opposite of the Gospel. What the enemy will tell you is perform and work until you're tired, and the Gospel will tell you, "Don't you understand that Jesus Christ has already worked and performed for you?"
Jesus Christ came down on a cross and accomplished it to the point where he was able to say, "It is finished." You can't even top it up. Even if you're a good pastor, there's nothing you can do to increase this. Your work is to receive the work that was done for you.
And some of you believe the lie that you keep performing and trying. "I got to be the perfect mom, the perfect husband, the perfect wife, the perfect teenager, the perfect employee, the perfect whatever." And he's going to rest.
There was a day in Bible class, I remember we were reading through the Gospel of Mark, and right at the beginning, Jesus gets baptized, and the Father looks down and goes, "You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." And the teacher looked up at us, and she was bawling, and we didn't know why.
And she said, "Notice that the Father says this about Jesus, and he hasn't even done anything yet. He has not performed a miracle. He has not preached a sermon. He has not walked on water. He has done nothing." And the Father said, "That's exactly what I needed to hear that day that I told that woman that her husband was dead, and I had the wrong guy."
You know, you remember that. You don't tend to forget that your pastor did that because you're like, "Yeah, I notice I don't get many calls to go to the hospital and visit y'all." But anyways, so it's like, I don't want my whole family to be destroyed. The guy thinks I'm dead.
So what I needed to hear during that time, because I believed I shouldn't be a pastor anymore when I made that mistake, I needed people to come around me and say, "You are his beloved Son, in whom he is well pleased, even though you've done nothing."
It doesn't matter the mistakes you've made. It doesn't matter the foibles you've done. It doesn't matter the sins you've done. That's why the cross is what it is, and you can stop trying and trying and trying. That's the point. That's the beauty of the Gospel. This is what God does for us.
So let me give you a few strategies, super practical. I wrote an article during COVID: six strategies to deal with burnout.
First, tell someone. Swallow your pride and tell someone. Don't live it alone. The Bible says it's not good for man to be alone. Tell someone. Talk to someone. The changes that happen in my life when I burned out at Village Church happened because I voiced them. I've lost my wife. I've lost my friends. I've watched them, our staff. We made changes. I'll talk about that in a second.
Secondly, keep leaning into God. The Psalms are filled with pain and isolation and depression and fear and anxiety. That's the beautiful point. They're written down, and they're expressed to God because when you're starting to feel burnout, you've got to talk to God about it. When you don't want to pray, that's when you pray. When you don't want to read the Bible, that's when you read the Bible.
Because as Martin Lloyd Jones says, here's what's going to happen in life: God, you've got to go back to what you know. Philippians 4, what you know, what you think about. You've got to go back to that even when you don't feel it. That is what is going to save you because I don't feel loved by God. I don't feel all of this list of stuff. It doesn't matter. Go back to what you know to be true, even at times when you're not feeling it.
Third, rest. Read the Gospels. Jesus took naps. Right? Come on. I don't know if this is true, but 70% of discipleship is getting a good night's sleep. Write it down. Live it out. Tell your spouse. That's what he said. You got Jesus sleeping in the back of the boat. The storm is going. Those ships are small. The disciples are like, "Ah, we're going to die, Jesus." And then they're like, "Wake up, wake up." And he goes up, and he's like, "Ah, this is like a dog at 2 AM. I don't understand why'd you wake me up?"
Jesus constantly slept. John chapter 4, Jacob's Well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. This week, I was supposed to do, see some of you, you have to build a life where you live smarter, not harder. I used to say this to my staff all the time. They would come to me with like this martyr complex: "I worked 50, 60 hours this week, boss. I was on vacation, and I still worked 15 hours." And I'm like, "Then work smarter. Don't work harder."
"Oh, give me your story about how hard you worked." Figure out a way to get your life in order. Listen, Sabbath is a weapon. Use it. This week, I was supposed to have a meeting. They were supposed to come to my house and do some premarital counseling. I hadn't seen my kids in a week and a half. I said, "Hey, we got to move it to Monday." And I just ordered pizza, and we watched "Les Mis," and I accomplished nothing.
And those aren't usually the stories the preachers tell. We usually go, "I was working so hard in this meeting." I did nothing, guys, because on the seventh day, God rested. And if he rests and you can't, you're going to burn out.
So Jesus rested. There were some things that Jesus didn't do. You notice multiple times, a guy named Gary Thomas wrote a book, "When to Walk Away." He talks about 30 times in the Gospels where Jesus Christ walked away. He didn't pick up that call and run to the emergency that you think you always need to run to because that is more about you than it is about them.
You like to be needed, and you burn yourself out trying to be needed. So you pick up the phone, and you answer that call, and you answer that email, and you always are there for the emergency, partly because I set up as a pastor a standard for you to reach everybody for Jesus, and it's not doing you any favors because there are times when Jesus himself walked away from toxic people, dangerous people, dangerous situations.
Matthew chapter 8, and when Jesus saw great multitudes about him, he gave a command to depart to the other side. What do you mean? They're ready to believe. We should do an altar call right now. And Jesus said, "I got a better idea. Let's go somewhere else. Let's depart for a bit. I think you guys need a break."
Thirty times in the Gospels, Jesus says it's not about what you're connected to that's important. John 15, it's sometimes about what you get disconnected from. Disconnected from bad habits, rhythms, patterns, people. Wayne Cordero says we don't forget that we're Christians; we forget that we're human, and that one oversight can debilitate the potential of our future.
And then Jesus Christ looks at us, and he gives this beautiful reality: Matthew chapter 11, "Come to me, all you who are weary, and you will find rest for your souls." You know why he says that? Because as one writer has said, hurry is not of the devil; it is the devil.
And you've got to start gauging the things you don't do sometimes versus the things you do do. So to end, how did I get out of this burnout scenario at Village Church? Well, here's a great principle for you. The only way you're ever going to get out of this and rest in Jesus is if you start to understand that all the nightmare scenarios that you come up with in your life, the things in your brain that you think will happen if you don't do a thing, just aren't true.
So the way that we solved it, we got into a situation where I was preaching a lot. We couldn't do a Saturday night service. We couldn't do a Sunday night service. So we just added services to all these different campuses, and all these, we got movie theaters, and I would just preach probably five times on a Sunday and travel around all within like a seven-hour span. Jump around, click there, quick there, get on that stage, get it.
And we did this for years until finally you would see me midweek, and I'm just dead, and everyone's like, "What are we going to do?" And we had a team meeting, and they said, "Well, there's one option: preach one time to a video camera at eight o'clock in the morning and show everybody else the video."
Even at the broadcast site, we will lower the LED wall, and you will be shown from the week previous, and that will go out to all the campuses so you can go from the chaos to preaching once live. And I'm like, "Here's what's going to happen: the church is going to die."
I have spent seven years of my life going hard to reach all these people, and now the church is going to die. And my staff said, "Okay, then let's keep the church alive, and you'll die." So I'm like, "All right, well, I guess that's the place."
Well, I got up in front of the church, and I said, "Guys, listen, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to preach one time. Now I'm not coming to your campuses. I'm not even going to be at this campus. I'm going to preach once at eight o'clock in the morning, and I know none of you are going to be there because you're not that godly, eight o'clock in the morning, to a video camera in front of 300 people that are all going to be sitting behind the video camera because we don't want their heads in the way when the LED wall comes down and shows the video from this week.
Oh, and you're going to be on one week delay. It won't even be the same week. That's what we're doing. God bless you. If you all want to leave the church, I'll give you some addresses for new churches." I was terrified.
Do you know what happened? The church grew because half the nightmares you create in your brain about things you're not going to do are there from the enemy. They're not real. It's like 30 minutes. Wait 30 minutes before you go in the water. It's in your brain. It's not real.
And you can rest and not do certain things because God, I was whistling around the foyer. I'd preach my one sermon. I was happy as a clam, and then I came to Bayside.
So the Father in heaven, we are tired people. We are anxious people. We are burned-out people. And yet, Jesus, your invitation to us: come and rest. It's your burden is so much lighter than the burden we put on ourselves and we let other people put on us.
And so, Jesus, in this room, let us actually believe your words and rest in you and stop being weary. There's nothing we need to perform. There's nothing we need to prove. Let us feel you right now. Just put your hand on us and really believe you are my beloved in whom I am well pleased. I've already done it for you. There's nothing you need to do.
Now go and live. Do that among us. In Jesus' great name, we pray. Amen.
Hey guys, Pastor Mark here, one of the senior pastors around here. So glad that you are actually part of Bayside online. You really are part of our family. We have grown over the last couple of years online a ton, and we really do consider you as part of our church family.
So what that means is make sure you subscribe and share this. It's great, but also get in a community group. Start watching the Bible study. Start being engaged. Even give. One of the ways that we can actually do online church and have this global community and even do the ministry of our campuses is by people partnering with us in the Gospel.
Paul talks about Philippians chapter one, and that means by your resources financially. There are people all over the world getting blessed through what we do at Bayside. And so, obviously, part of that is giving and using and stewarding that for the glory of God.
So we're super thankful if you do that. We'd love you to start doing that, and just super thankful you're part of our church. So glad you're with us. Make sure that you let us know you're watching and part of this because we want to get in touch with you and thank you and serve you any way we can.
Anyway, thanks, guys, and we will see you next week.
on Nov 05, 2023
